COP28: Could have been done on Zoom? Why this all looks a farce to the rest of the world.

Rather than fly to Dubai's COP28, should King Charles have led by example

and sent a video message over Zoom to show the way forward, instead?

An interesting fact - The total CO2 amount in the world's atmospheric gases =

CO2 = 1/2 of 1% of the total 100% of all gases.

Nitrogen is 95% of all gases.
 

Another year, another meaningless 'COP Summit' ? - this time we learn that there will be some 400,000 attendees to the Dubai COP28 conference, you can't help feeling that there is some element of hypocritical repetition here. Or another 'you couldn't make it up' story.

400,000 people intent on 'saving the Planet' are jetting from across the world to warm and sunny Dubai, perhaps there is clue in that. It is warm and sunny?

One thing we did benefit from during Covid was that so many of us were able to work from home. So that was one good thing to come out of it.

Zoom became the vital work tool of the day, often saving many people the worthless drudge of commuting to an office every day and allowing them to work from home. Hurrah! And from having to mix with stupid idiots you normally would otherwise avoid. But I digress...

COP28's spectacular own goal has been to treat the rest of the world not attending this earnest jamboree as fools. 

They have not seen that had this conference and all it's virtue signalling could have been conducted on Zoom. The likely only outcome of COP28 is to achieve a COP29 in 2024. Nearly 30 COP meetings later we are still alive and the doom and gloom about a dead planet hasn't happened yet.

The world is an oil based economy, Oil isn't going away anytime soon, nor are fossil fuels. The 'beloved' and failing EV market will need Oil to make tyres for these vehicles, which wear out tyres at a far higher rate than Petrol or Diesel vehicles. 80% of a Tyre is made from Oil. The paint and plastics on an EV are made from Oil. Go figure. Do the math - We need Oil.

Tarmac for roads includes Oil. EV's due to their weight cause more damage to roads.

If the West stops using Petrol or Diesel, Russia and China as examples likely won't be so squeamish. We can produce synthetic Petrol and Diesel fuels from renewable elements. We do not need to abandon the internal combustion engines, which are the cleanest ever now and will only improve.

We make clean air zones in cities, yet base an airport on the city periphery which blows pollution right back across these 'clean air zones' - we are not stupid. 

We can see the stupidity of charging motorists to drive and allowing unabated, free pollution by aircraft to be dumped back on those cities into those clean air zones.

The difference between Natural Gas and Hydrogen is barely a few elements, yet there is this a fanatical zeal to get rid of Natural Gas usage only because it is a 'fossil fuel.' This is frankly ridiculous when there is no viable ad cheaply priced technology in place, to take its place.

Whilst King Charles often pours forth his views on the climate and his concerns are valid to a point, he could have stolen a march on the whole COP28 shebang by giving a Zoom message to the COP28 delegates from the UK, rather than jet off to Dubai.

Perhaps this might have made the other delegates think. Maybe not. 

However, with all manner of celebrities and old has-been politicians bobbing up at COP28, it looks just to be another nice little 'jolly' - the lure of warm winter sunshine and the opportunities for networking, glad-handing and hobnobbing, or any other form of nobbing one wishes to indulge in, must out way any concerns for the climate then?

Be warned, the public are not fooled by all this vacuous grandstanding and dire warnings of climate doom being spewed out at COP28 and every COP before and likely in the future. 

Where is Greta Thunberg when you need here? I suppose it's early days yet and she has a week or so to pop up uninvited and foist her views on this jolly shindig.

Boris Johnson - Working from home is part of the future Human jobs market, it helps cut climate missions too.

 

Some of us love working from home!

To a lot of people, the recent working from home (WFH) scenario as been something we have been saying we can do for years and wanted to - but, deaf ears would not listen, now we have proved it can be done as it has been forced on the workplace over the last year. 

Boris Johnson asking Civil Servants to go back to their desks as a gesture of reassurance isn't perhaps what they wanted to hear. Some of us have smelt the fresh air and we want it. 

Boris Johnson wants people to return to offices - one reason is to save the local businesses, but many of these are teetering on unviability and some have leases due to end, many of which will not be taken up again by the current tenants. 

Every day since 2016, 15 High Street shops a day closed their doors for good. Pushing people back into offices is not going to work, will not be popular and many will seek to move to working from home jobs if it is denied to them at present when barriers are lifted.

Boris may have a valid point in his gesture, but recent surveys suggest many people now want to work from home permanently. Why not just reduce the rates burden on small businesses to compensate for the loss of trade on the High Street? 

Greedy councils charging high parking charges, high rail fares, high fuel costs - why travel if you can avoid it? Surely this reduced travel is better for the environment a point that we are so frequently lectured about.

The lockdown has seen much of the day to day business go on-line and thrive. The genie is out of the bottle, people are going that way in preference to going out to shop. Why struggle into a town, pay a fortune to park, get a fine for overstaying and maybe not get what you want? Why not do it on-line, find what you want and use the time you have not wasted to enjoy yourself? Unless I know I can get what I want in my local town, I buy on-line.

This survey below shows most people want to continue the WFH scenario. Another one I saw showed over 33% wanted full time WFH, 19% to go back to the office 100% of the time and the rest adopt a hybrid model of home and work locations.

WFH works for me because I save more than £2000 a year not travelling to an office to do work I can do from home. I don't have to put up with people I would rather not have to associate with. I don't have to endure office politics, the stress and I get more done. So its a win win situation for me and the business.

I have reduced the stress involved in going to work greatly. All the time I was able to work 5 days a week from home in lockdown, I felt much better being at home, I can start earlier and finish earlier, I don't waste 70 minutes a day travelling to a place I can do without going to and frankly don't want to, just to do the majority of what I can at home. 

My quality of life is much better too. It is obvious where my future is - not in an office. I can look out on countryside and have cats around me as I work, real coffee, proper tea, why should I go into an office in a town to be with people who I have to tolerate, when I can do the same work at home with less stress and have no exposure to danger on the roads in my daily commute which I don't have to do?

It just works better all round for me. WFH is great. I want it. It is the future for me.

WFH has been coming - I have been saying for years it should be an option, in 2000 I did partly work from home saving me then 2 hours and 84 miles travelling per day. 

We have now replaced the commuter rush hour, we are using less resources to get to do a job - now a zoom call or just working on-line does it for many. Not every job can be done like this but many banks and other businesses are going this way. It saves them buildings only half full.

Why rush to a location where everyone else is rushing to get to a place of work all at the same time frame? This is outdated lunacy in an age when we can go into Space and walk on other Planets.

A salesman from a tool company I know said he is hardly travelling much now due to people changing how they want to do business - people want to do business by phone or on-line it seems. Air travel has been curtailed, in my view a lot of it was not necessary. 

Automation is now swallowing more human jobs than ever before

We are now reaching a point where I have been saying for some time that in the next 20 years, many jobs will have been taken over by robots. Since 2009, I have watched the job market decline, both in terms of quality and quantity of jobs. 

The demographic time bomb is also kicking in as we have fewer younger people coming into the workplace - the HGV drivers crisis has been coming for years. 5 generations since 1960 have been able to choose to have a family or not - now the deficit of fewer younger employees available to work is coming to be a reality. Robots will help bridge that gap by automating a lot of the boring things we don't have to.

We will need a Basic Income Guarantee System to pay people whose jobs and careers will have been lost to automation. Even niche jobs like Lawyers, Solicitors, Accountants will not be immune from automation. At the other end of the scale, low skilled work like fruit picking can be done more efficiently and cheaper by automation. Humans in the work place are becoming an endangered species. Boris Johnson - this is something you should be aware of. This isn't going away.

A lot of human work is basically quite futile, it can be done by machines better, faster and with less error. Why don't we free up our human society to live proper lives? 

We should use this work transition to enrich people's lives. Basic Income means that we can dump the useless, chaotic and draconian Universal Credit system too. We can streamline all benefits with a Basic Income program and cut out job centres, benefits offices and save millions here in this sector and the billions paid out in benefits system errors.

Our human future starts now, with the shift for some to home working, then as the robots take over more human jobs, we can enjoy a better life with a safety net of Basic Income. The money will go round so what is paid out will come back and it will benefit the High Street - with premises being taken for new ventures as the financial safety net is there. 

It just needs some vision and to look forward rather than at just the work from home deficit that is current thinking. 

Until we can unite all humans on this planet to adopt a plan where we all work together and live peacefully then we will achieve little from the possible open to us.